GLOBAL HEALTH ACTION – Fuelling a hands-on approach to global health challenges

On the partners Global Health Action (GHA) is a new, international, peerreviewed Open Access journal affiliated to the Umeå Centre for Global Health Research (CGH) at Umeå University, Sweden, and published by Co-Action Publishing. The Umeå Centre for Global Health Research is located within the Division of Epidemiology and Public Health Sciences at Umeå University, which also acts as the WHO Collaborating Centre on Epidemiological Surveillance and Public Health Training, hosts the Umeå International School of Public Health, and co-hosts the Swedish Research School for Global Health. As part of an extensive worldwide network of institutions and collaborators, the Division has contributed to global health research and teaching for more than two decades, with work characterised by multidisciplinary socio-medical perspectives and combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Co-Action Publishing is a relatively new Open Access publisher based in Scandinavia and one of only a handful of publishing houses worldwide offering a true OA publishing model for scholarly journals. The content of a journal such as GHA begs for Open Access, and it is therefore only natural that CGH and Co-Action Publishing should team up to ensure a great impact for the journal in years to come. All articles published in GHA will be freely accessible online immediately after they have been accepted for publication and can thereafter be linked, read, downloaded, stored, printed, used, and data-mined by anybody with a computer and access to the internet (1). Moreover, the Open Access model offers additional multimedia benefits such as videos, audios, links to full datasets, unlimited colour budgets and interactive features, all of which the printed medium cannot provide. Co-Action Publishing will ensure that the best web technology supports the editorial team at CGH as well as the contributing authors and thereby enhance the scholarly content of GHA. What we call for Public health challenges in a global context are particularly found in the widening gaps between winners and losers of globalisation (2). To address these challenges it is crucial not only to act constructively on what is already known and to evaluate the results, but also to establish what we yet have to learn and still need to implement. GHA therefore specifically welcomes papers that report on results and evidence arising out of practical implementations of current knowledge, as well as papers suggesting strategies where none exist. Thus GHA aims to contribute to fuelling a more concrete, hands-on approach to global health challenges. We particularly welcome manuscripts from lowand middle-income countries, while also encouraging South-South and South-North collaborations. All papers published in GHA are expected to address a global agenda and include a strong policy or implementation component. They may emphasise the foundations of health research (health information), underlying epidemiological causes (health determinants), actions for health and their effects (health interventions), the impact of the global physical and biological changes (environmental change and health) or the roles of health care and the importance of gender perspectives (health systems and gender).